ributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break
the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the
parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over
the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was
aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established
system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of
the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still
conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical
old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black
folly of superstition. Men at length ventured once more to look at one
another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent,
and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made
plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty
victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in
consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his
large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and
majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of
truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the
universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for
his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own
wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent
and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and
meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only
to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those
regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the
obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to
hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in
the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing
of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the
natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process
of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding
in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of
duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in
interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse,
but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the
entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril,
is made cheerful